Categories for Musings

You know, maybe it’s just me. But I have to say that it’s pretty unseemly to see an aspiring Premier heckling the Queen’s representative in the Ontario Legislature. Showing up late, then giggling like a schoolboy.

Stay classy, Little Timmy.

UPDATE FROM SHARP-EYED READER! Hi Warren, I believe that Christine Elliott is in the photo. Not Elizabeth Witmer. You are probably used to seeing her with a lawn gnome. Catherine

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I’m at the Leg – where, from time to time, I give the Liberal caucus comms advice – and listening in right now. This, to me, is the key part:

No place has escaped the Great Recession unscathed.

That is why your government is responding to the extraordinary challenge of the global recession with two extraordinary measures.

First: it plans to invest over $32 billion in roads, bridges, public transit and energy retrofits for our schools.

This is creating and sustaining over 300,000 jobs and puts money into the hands of families, where it is needed — and it is stimulating our economy while we emerge from the recession.
Second: your government is supporting Ontarians in their choice to go back to school so they can get a good job — not just any job.

Ontario’s Second Career Program is a first for Canada because it supports up to two years of long-term training.

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Think about it.

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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: David Shenk
Date: Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 9:51 PM
Subject: Contact from warrenkinsella.com
To: Warren Kinsella

David Shenk wrote:

Warren,

Thanks for the kind words about Data Smog. I hope I can interest you in my new book, The Genius in All of Us.

– David Shenk

Website: geniusblog.davidshenk.com

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…which should closely resemble the old www.warrenkinsella.com.  Actually, it’s identical.

There are some differences, I guess.  For example, if you look for old, old entries, we’ve whacked all of those.  Buh-bye. Some, like Stockwell Day and the dinosaurs, were positively ancient.  They may be out there in the Internet ether on Google or something, but I rather doubt they have much value.

The comments section is, certainly, different.  It’s better than that old external platform, I think, and I hope you will try it out (just remember I’m a hardass about republishing other people’s libels).

Anyway, here it is.  In the next few weeks, we plan to tweak the design stuff, and so on.  It’ll be fun.

In the meantime, and for no discernible reason whatsoever, here’s a still from a Janet Jackson video from about two decades ago.  Heh.

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Warren and Tim share a laugh mere moments before the Reformatory anthem-induced whiplash hits.

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• Adam: Wakey, wakey! Like, have you lost your mind?
• Welcome back, Bob! Great, great news – so much for Little Timmy’s promised surge. What’s that? Zero for three, now?
• Hook, line, sinker: we all take Harper’s bait – talking about what he wants us to talk about (a diversion), instead of what we should be talking about (the gargantuan program cuts that lie ahead). Sigh.
• Gotcha! Finally, from one of wk.com’s ever-watchful watchers, a missive about this weekend’s Ontario PC AGM in Ottawa. “We need content,” indeed:

From: Brett Bell <brettdbell@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 22:41:17 -0500
To: Brett Bell<brettdbell@gmail.com>
Cc: Joseph Lavoie<jl@josephlavoie.com>
Subject: IMPORTANT – AGM & Twitter

Hi:

Hope you’re well. As we gear up for this weekend’s AGM, I wanted to reach out to the more active Twitter users to talk about our strategy going into the Convention. Beginning around noon Friday, the current AGM site will be retooled to serve as an online hub to provide real-time update to visitors and Party members who cannot make it to Ottawa. We have a full compliment of bloggers, photographers and videographers capturing all the event and we will publish all of it to the web, Facebook and Twitter.

Speaking of which, I hope each of you will make a specific point of tweeting as much as possible about the AGM program – we need lots of content. I wanted to also let you know about some of the ways we will be using Twitter over the weekend, which will be spearheaded by Joseph Lavoie (copied).

First, the Party has set up a specific Twitter account @pcagm2010 that will post updates and content from the AGM website and the floor of the Convention. If you Tweet something and want the Convention folks to see it, tweet it to us there.

Secondly, we will be using a new hashtag for the AGM: #pcAGM. You can obviously still use #pcpo but the #pcAGM will go up on the AGM website. Beginning Friday, please use this to tweet about your AGM experience.

Please post as many pics as possible to the hashtag or to @pcagm2010. We will grab them and post them on the site. You can also e-mail them to pics@agm2010.ca.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks so much for your assistance.

BB

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What an interesting coincidence! A denial of service attack the very same hour the federal budget is released.

Sigh.

Anyway: wk.com’s Team Propellerhead™ has been busily tinkering in their Digital Demons© workshop for weeks, and building a More Robust Platform® for the website (all contents © protected, 2010, BTW). It’ll be unveiled this weekend.

Reformatory DOS stunts will continue unabated, I suspect. Or as long as I’m involved with the federal Grits, that is.

Ahem.

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In the mid-nineties, when I still worked as a political staffer for a federal cabinet minister, we decided to introduce the two dollar coin – the one that would come to be known as the toonie.

The toonie budget was going to contain big, big changes. One of our deputy ministers, a nice but naïve fellow, thought no one would pay attention to the new coin whatsoever. He thought the other budgetary measures would dwarf the media coverage of the toonie.

I told him that, with the greatest of respect, he was dead wrong. “The media will always pay more attention to stuff like this,” I said. “You may think it’s trivial, but they don’t. Same with the public.” We made a gentlemen’s bet about the outcome. I won it.

History repeats itself: the Harper Reformatories have floated their anthem-change trial balloon, fully expecting that it would kick-start a lot of chatter around the water coolers of the nation – and thereby provide cover for the big-ticket items to come, which will almost certainly include massive program cuts. They’ve been wildly successful with this day-old gambit: check this out – dozens of iterations of the anthem word-change stunt.

Personally – speaking only for myself – I’m all for making the anthem gender neutral. (That’s not all: I also favour removing references to God in the national anthem. And I say that as a devout and church-going Christian-type guy.)

But what I think is totally irrelevant. What matters is what the government is really doing, here. That is what we need to pay attention to, but many won’t.

When you are hunting bear, I always says to my war room kids, don’t get distracted by rabbit tracks.

Or, depending on the circumstances, toonies.

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“They could have Tweeted the Throne Speech, and still had twelve characters left over.”

Liberal MP Marlene Jennings (not verbatim, but close)

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